This is 99% invisible.
This past February, the American New Miss Maddox Association held its annual convention
“at the Savannah Convention Center in Savannah, Georgia.”
From the uninitiated, New Miss Maddox is the fancy word for coins and the study of coins. A massive room. There are dozens and dozens and dozens and dozens of vendors. And that's reporter and novice New Miss Maddox, Katie Thornton.
This was my first time at a coin show, but right away, I could tell that this convention
was not necessarily catering to the merely coin curious. More than anything this show was for collectors. Mostly of U.S. coins, with each booth featuring something for which there was some kind of small but extremely avid fandom. These gold pieces were made with gold from the California gold rush, were especially in what's called three-cent silvers or trimes. These are half dimes.
Have you ever heard of half dimes? I have now. There was also a society dedicated to crushed pennies, like, when the machines smushed the pennies, or as they call them, elongated.
“Why do we stop on pennies? You give me a foreign currency and build smash it and see”
how lovely the design comes up. But Katie wasn't on the hunt for anything quite so niche. Instead, she was in Savannah to learn about what has to be the most widely collected coin in American history. So I'm of the age where my sort of introduction to coin collecting was to stake quarters. Do you have any of the children?
Yeah. Of course, everyone in America knows about state quarters. Chances are you have one hiding in your couch cushion right now. From 1999 until 2009, the U.S. meant issued 56 special quarter designs, one for each state, and territory, and Washington DC. They put billions of these special quarters into circulation.
On the front, you'll see the classic profile of George Washington, but turn any of them over and you'll see an engraving of something that some state or territory likes about itself.
“The quarter from my home state of Minnesota features a loon.”
Kansas has a bison, and Illinois, well, it couldn't decide. So it has Lincoln kind of framed by the outline of the state with the Sears Tower in the background. So what awkwardly, two different state quarters featured the right brother's flyer, because the first modern airplane was built in Ohio, but it was flown in North Carolina. But the state quarter series is more than just a bunch of cool designs on the back of some
coins. Yeah, when they first came out, if you were like me, you probably thought, "Hey, cute, a fun little thing the government did just for the hell of it." But that's just not true. In reality, just beneath its shiny metal surface, the state quarters initiative was a
high-stakes government program, one in which coin collecting played a critical role.
Because it turns out the mint didn't spend all those years creating billions of new coins just for the sake of civic pride. Instead, the state quarters were developed for the express purpose of getting us to collect them, and to turn a healthy profit for the U.S. government. Today, the story of how the U.S. makes money off of making money, and how it makes even
more if you collect. In many ways, the mint state quarters program is the product of a series of innovations in American currency, starting with the invention of the quarter itself. Because for the first 200 years of colonial history, America didn't even have a standard system of denomination.
So the earliest coins that were used in the earliest settlements of what became the United States were literally the coins that settlers brought in their pockets. Jessie Craft is an assistant curator at the American Numismatic Society, not the American Numismatic Association, which put on the coin shell a different Numismatic group, and he focuses on American coins.
The first votes that came over actually had a lot of German settlers as well, so there's
good mix of German coins, English coins, of course Spanish American coins. Soon coins from all over the world made their way into the colonies. Delicious shillings, Portuguese jose, German toddlers, it was chaotic. It's not like the exchange rate for these things was one to one. But Craft says there's one thing making it easier.
In those days, coins were made almost entirely of rare precious metals like gold, or more often, silver. That meant that no matter what country the coin was from, its value was determined by its metal content. How much gold or silver was in there?
Each piece was weighed to check its gold weight.
And because the different coins had different weights and wore down even just like a little bit of friction on a gold coin would actually affect its value. And if that sounds impractical, well, it often was. Imagine trying to buy a herd of sheep only to find that the precious silver coin you'd had in your satchel this whole time was too worn down to pay for it all.
Cating things further, there were never enough of these random worn down coins making
their way into the colonies for everyone to use in the first place. So the colonists also had to use something else as money. One of the first pieces of money that was like legislated as legal tender is actually corn. Corn, wheat, and barley were all literally used as money, with an exchange rate, just like
any other currency. In 1631, one bushel of corn had the same spending power as six English shillings.
“Even accepted corn for payment and taxes, that's how legal it was like this is money.”
Eventually, though, people got tired of buying their cows with a combination of random European denominations plus a bunch of bulky loose grain. So after the United States won its independence, its leaders finally decided that we might want to make our own standardized monetary system. You know, is that that point Jefferson wrote his now famous notes on coinage?
Oh yeah, it's so famous, you know, a very simple name, but it kind of redefined everything.
Jefferson basically says, "Hey, British money is confusing.
Appents is one two hundred fortyeth of a pound. A far thing is one nine hundred sixtyeth." Spanish money, though. It uses easy, common sense fractions. Have quarters, that's what we should do.
So in 1792, the US meant began making dollar coins, named for the Spanish dollar as United States base unit.
“Just like their Spanish predecessors, dollar coins were made of silver.”
And early on, the mint made gold coins, too. They were called eagles. That's literally the name of the coin, silver dollars and gold eagles. In eagles was worth ten dollars. So these are half eagles, these five dollar pieces.
This is Caroline Turco. She is a curator at the American Numismatic Association. Iranians are at the coin show in Savannah, where she showed me these old gold coins. So it's based on weight. So the five dollar half eagles here are five dollars worth of gold.
Give her take a few cents at that time to consider the amount of work and money it took to make it. And then the smaller ones, they're a quarter eagle and they are worth two and a half dollars worth of gold.
“And silver coins worked pretty much the same way, which is to say the way they do today.”
Dollars, half dollars, and of course, quarters. But beyond just standardizing the denominations, the early US mint faced another equally important Numismatic task. It had to decide what our coins would look like.
Only these first designs were nothing like our modern state quarters.
Instead of dozens of elaborate variations, early US coins only featured a small number of very simple, someone say, boring motifs and deliberately so. That's because the mint used design in part to guard against counterfitting. By making engravings clean, simple and consistent, you could easily spot any deviation. One of the reasons why they wanted to keep the designs so similar was if they all had minor
minor differences, then a counterfitter could create another coin with a minor difference that would just kind of be accepted. All these counterfitting countermeasures required that the first US coins all looked pretty much the same. And thanks to our first president, they didn't even have any real faces on them.
The first US mint, they go to George Washington and they say, "Sir, we're going to need your best to be made so that we can have your face on coins." But he says absolutely not, because that is for a monarchy. And George is like, "We'd literally just fought a war to get rid of our monarch. How dare you try to make me into that same symbol?"
And he said, "Over my dead body." Which by the way, if you've seen a quarter recently, awkward. But even more than the concern over counterfitting or Washington's living body, it was the technology of the time that limited the design of these early coins. In Gravers in the 19th century, had to carve designs by hand into a tiny steel stamp called
a die, using even tiny little chisel tools. They didn't have electric lights, so they were doing this outside, or in a window, or straining their eyes and candlelight. Then they'd have to either put some metal under the die and hammer the image onto the coin to be, or stamp the design onto the coin with a press powered by human muscle.
Or horses, or eventually steam.
Not easy.
The first human figure allowed on a U.S. coin was Lady Liberty, but given the technological
“constraints, the men's engravers quickly discovered there wasn't much you could do with”
her. Initially, it was mostly her head. Her head and profile with flowing hair, later her hair was tied up with a ribbon. Eventually they figured out how to get her whole body on there. Even so, the coin designs from year to year were pretty bland, until finally, in 1904.
President Theter Roosevelt said, "Hey, our coinage is ugly." He actually described the design of American coins as "attrocious, hideousness." He was not playing around, and Theter Roosevelt was like, "I want good stuff again." Luckily, at some point during Teddy's tantrum, he made a specific demand. The U.S. men's he urged should import a near miraculous new device that had recently
been invented in France.
It was called the John V.A. Reduction Machine.
Essentially, you could sculpt a large-sized coin, you know, sometimes two in three feet in diameter, you know, quote unquote coin, and then you could put this design onto the John V.A. Reduction Machine, and it would have this little stylus and just slowly, slowly go over the design, and at the same exact time, engrave that design onto a die, the actual size of the coin.
Ah, so cool. The John V.A. Machine allowed the mint to mass-produce coins with the level of detail that would have been impossible before. Suddenly, Lady Liberty could do more things. Starting in the early 1900s, you got Liberty walking towards a rising sun, Liberty ascending
a mountain with a capital dome in the background, Liberty with a winged fringy and cap with a beautiful column wrapped in a vining olive plant on the other side. This aesthetic revolution in US currency has been termed the American Renaissance of coins. It even led to an explosion in special commemorative coin designs in the 1930s, for things like the Texas Centennial and the opening of the Bay Bridge, to the point that the whole
thing actually got kind of out of hand. There's one commemorative coin that was made to have a living person on it, it was an Alabama senator. Because he wanted his face on a coin. But the ability to put almost anything you wanted on a coin was not enough on his own
to pave the way for the state quarters program.
For that to happen, US coins would need to undergo one more critical transformation.
This time, to their metal content.
“Remember, up until this point, silver coins were still made of silver.”
They had that inherent metal value. But in the 1960s that ended, President Lyndon Johnson got rid of all of our pretty shiny silver coins and replaced them with something called clad coins. In clad coinage, a piece of low cost kind of ugly metal is clad in a thin layer of something a little bit prettier.
It's a much cheaper way to make a coin. So when 1965, looking for ways to save money, Johnson convinced Congress to stop putting silver in coins, instead he had them minted from copper and then covered in nickel. They were nicknamed Johnson Sanwiches. Jessie Kraft says that prior to this, a financial government ever debased its currency,
they would only dare to do it very gradually, changing the coin's metal content a little at a time, over the course of decades. LBJ got bless them just went ahead and did it all at once. In 1964, literally, all the coins are silver, 1965, none of them are silver. So it kind of like created valueless coins, so it's actually one of the most significant
things that ever happened since perhaps the beginning of coins themselves and no one seemed to care. And it's true, no one really cared. Everyone just carried on as if we were all still lugging these little pieces of silver around and continued spending and accepting U.S. coins, like nothing had changed.
But for the mint, everything had changed. Because this strange, melodical bait and switch meant that suddenly a coin like a quarter costs way less than a quarter to make, and that discrepancy between the production cost of the coin and its face value allowed the mint to engage in a money-making scheme beloved by governments the world over.
It's called "Seener Itch." It's really a simple concept. This is Philip Deal. These days, he's the president of U.S. Money Reserve, a coin seller. A few decades ago, though, he was director of the U.S. Mint, and he says to understand
“"Seener Itch," you have to think of the mint as a business.”
A business whose product is coins. And that is, like any product in business, you hope to produce it at a cost that is less than what you sell up for. So the goal for the mint is to make coins as cheaply as possible, but to still sell them
At their face value so that they can turn a profit, just like any other product.
And when you do that with coins, that's called "Seener Itch."
“So "Seener Itch" is the profit the mint makes from selling a coin for more than a cost”
to produce it, like Philip said, simple. Now, if you're wondering who would be stupid enough to pay 25 cents for a coin that only costs a few cents to make, well, you are, and me too. And me, we all end up paying full face value for these coins. Thanks to a chain of sale that starts with the mint's largest customer, the independent
federal reserve bank, which just for clarity operates independently of the federal government. The federal reserve, they pay us the face value of the coin, and then those coins are distributed to the regional federal reserve banks, and the regional federal reserve banks then take orders from the banking system in the United States and the coins are delivered to the banks. Let me translate, at the risk of making this part a little too simple.
The mint makes coins, again, let's say, quarters as cheaply as it can. The banks then buy those quarters at face value from the mint. Businesses by quarters at face value from banks, and when we get change from the cash registers at those businesses, we get those quarters. So everyone in that sequence, banks, businesses, people pay 25 cents for something that
the mint originally made for much, much less. Once a quarter gets old and worn out, the US government can end up buying it back and recycling the metal, but that can take a long time.
And that coin might have circulated for 30 years, and so for us, the mint, that coin is basically
like a 30-year long-term loan, interest-free. So, in the end, the only one turning a profit is the US government.
“But the truth is, this approach only worked well for a little while.”
When the US first started making significant senior-age off of coins in the 1960s, it was a good bet. The difference between the production cost and the sales price ensured that the mint made about four-and-a-half cents off of every nickel, nine-and-a-half cents off of every dime, and twenty-four cents off of every quarter, even the penny made a little bit of money.
But as the price of metals like copper rose, so did the cost of making coins. As early as 1974, the cost of making the penny was already approaching its face value. So the mint futs with the metal ratios again, just trying to make this thing for even cheaper.
They up to the zinc and lowered the copper, which again worked at first, but not for long.
So when Philip Deal became the director of the US Mint in 1994, one of his main goals was to stop and ideally reverse this decline. And so, when I was the director of the Mint, 30 years ago, I was the first mint director
“to recommend the elimination of the penny.”
And it was long overdue then. Unfortunately, Philip did not have been necessary sway to kill the penny. America would have to wait for someone else to make that one happen. But there was another more exciting idea to boost the senior edge that was being bounced around the mint at the same time.
A scheme to increase the sales of one of their biggest earners, the quarter. And after a couple years, I started thinking about whether or not it was possible. And I became convinced we could do it. At that time, in the mid-90s, every quarter, thanks to a Thai face value, was still netting the mint about 22 cents in senior age.
And every year, some of those quarters would fall out of circulation. People lost them, accidentally threw them out, or put them in coin jars in the car. Which meant every year, the banks had to ask the Mint for more quarters to replace all those missing coins, make up the gap, and ensure that the country didn't run out of change. That of course was good for the US government, because selling more quarters to the banks
generated more senior edge for the mint. But what if there was a way to get people to take even more quarters out of circulation every year? Well, one way was to convince people to start collecting them. Only the mint couldn't just rely on hardcore collectors, like the ones I met at the convention
to get the job done. The idea was to take billions of dollars worth of quarters out of circulation. If it was ever going to do that, the mint would somehow have to convince ordinary people, who rarely even thought about quarters, to start collecting them too. And what better way to encourage ordinary Americans to start collecting quarters than by issuing
a bunch of special designs? Say 50 of them. And so, I'm sort of famous there for having created the 50 State Quarter's program. Sneaky? Perhaps.
The idea had been circling among coin fans for years.
Canada's mint had already done something similar, and it made money.
But Philip couldn't just order the mint to make a bunch of new designs.
“After all, the mint, by this point, had been stamping quarters with the same design of”
George Washington in profile since 1932. Having lots of new designs required lots more resources. To make the State Quarter's program happen, the mint needed an advocate in Washington. So Philip went to a congressman from Delaware, named Mike Castle, and laid out his idea. I said now, this has tremendous education potential.
Each one of the 50 states will have designs emblematic of the state, people in the students will become excited about it. Philip told him there was no way they could do all these coins in one year. He was thinking they'd rolled them out five a year for a decade. But he didn't just want to release them alphabetically.
That's boring. We're not teaching anybody anything. Instead, Philip suggested to the congressman from Delaware that they released the coins in the order that the states ratified the constitution.
And it just so happened that Delaware was the first state.
“And I knew that I could sell him on that with that line, and man he bought.”
And he became such a champion of that, and I needed a champion. The mint needed the treasuries approval, and the treasuries at the time did not like the idea. Too many things could go wrong. They wanted a study done. Everybody in Washington knows that studies are designed to kill proposals.
Just it always. So the treasuries ran some numbers. Philip and his colleagues did too. How much seniorage each quarter would net the government. And also how many additional quarters they would get to sell to the banks due to people
collecting them and taking them out of circulation. We looked at what's going to be the incremental increase in demand for quarters from people who want to pull them out of circulation and collect them.
And the models came up with a range of 2.6 billion to 3.5 billion.
In other words, the amount of quarters people took out and kept in their private collection would generate the government at least 2.6 billion dollars in profit. And the treasuries ended up recommending the program. And man, there was the deputy secretary. I was at that meeting.
And the deputy secretary of the treasuries was hot. When his hand pick committee made that recommendation. Congress gave them the go ahead in late 1997. And just over a year later, in 1999, the state quarters went live. Hi, hall of chromatheafrog here announcing the news 50 state quarters from the United States
men. We important. Kermit the frog. I wanted Kermit because he was the perfect spokes frog for our product because the appeal was so broad.
Which quarter tells something about the state it represents, this one's new jersey. It was the first time in decades that there was any significant change made to a U.S. coin. And it was exciting.
The incredible bus 50 state quarters from the United States men, the most exciting change
in America's ever seen. Philip and his team had done their research. They knew people loved the treasure hunt aspect of collecting. So they worked that into the program. All U.S. coins have mint marks, little letters on the front, indicating at which meant
the coin was made. So they made sure every state quarter bore one of two mint marks. P for the Philadelphia Mint or D for Denver. So people would have twice as many coins to collect. The states, especially loved it, governors got their constituents involved, submitting design
concepts and voting on their favorites. And that was a brilliant marketing move because you got all this free earned publicity as each state's coin was coming up for production. And people would anxiously await that other coins are released. That is true.
If you were around when the state quarters first debuted, like I was, you will remember this. They were like the weather. Everyone talked about them all the time. Everyone.
Kids loved it. They're parents loved it. We figured teenagers weren't cared a bit.
“How many of them were competing with computer games, how can coins compete with that?”
hugely successful with teenagers too. In fact, I remember standing in lines of music concerts or restaurants and being around teenagers in young 20 year olds who'd be talking about the quarters. At times, it seemed like almost everyone collected them, or at least would hold onto a few of their favorites.
To this day, I am low to part with a Connecticut quarter.
I mean, have you seen this thing?
It is. Corsias. Soon, the private market was caching in on it too, selling all sorts of accessories. Are you like me and my family collecting the new US quarters? Problem is, where do you put them?
The USA coin collection album. You'll receive this unique map, which features them face to hold each quarter. Now, you can have the perfect way to proudly display your collection with the America's 50-state quarters wouldn't frame. Due to overwhelming demand for these quarters, this is a limited offer for a limited time.
“You must act now, but wait, order within the next 10 minutes and will include a special”
bonus, our 50-state backspot, filled with exciting information about each day. Call now. As planned, the coins rolled out 5 a year for 10 years.
They made nearly 35 billion of these quarters.
Sadly, a stack of 35 billion quarters is not tall enough to reach the moon. We checked, sorry. You're just going to imagine a lot of quarters. The program was so popular that after a decade of releases, the men's extended the run an extra year and added the territories.
By the end, so many quarters had gone out of circulation, that the banking system had to purchase more than twice as many quarters as it had in the 10 years before the initiative. That increased in demand, netted the meant by conservative estimates, $2.6 billion. Just as Philips' team had originally predicted. Am I understanding correctly that that was from the seniorage alone?
Yes. Wow. Those quarters, those circulating quarters, were huge demand and were taken out of circulation and that's for that $2.6 billion come from. But money went back into the treasuries general fund, which went to lowering the tax burden
and paying down the national debt. It was a huge victory and it turned a whole generation onto the magic of coins, including Caroline Turco. I remember, like, when the state quarters came out. I was interested for the very first time and, you know, here in this show, I have this
is my sixth show and I've never seen the U.S. meant this busy, never.
In the past year, coins have been in the headlines. The U.S. finally stopped producing the penny, RIP. We have new coin designs that honor the U.S. is 250th. coins whose images paint a very specific and perhaps overly generous view of early American history, with designs of pilgrims and the Mayflower.
These coins will be around for a long time and, love them or hate them, they are probably going to get some folks hooked on coin collecting. That's good for the mint, but they're not the only ones who want to see the hobby live on. Every year, the ANA, who puts on the coin show, encourages collectors to do the apparent
opposite of what the mint intended and puts some of the more unusual coins back into circulation. But really, it's just their own way of peaking people's interest. If you ever come across an old standing liberty quarter or a wheat penny, there's a good chance you have a collector to thank for it.
“At which point, you get to decide, what's this coin worth to you?”
Ultimately, the state quarters program did something similar, just on a much bigger scale. I got so many of us feeling sentimental about these little hunks of copper and nickel, not just the coin nerds. I didn't have a set of state quarters, but my neighbor did, he had a book and everything. And when I found a state quarter, a gasp put it in my pocket and run over to Andy's house
to see if he had Wisconsin yet.
He always had Wisconsin, he always had whatever I found, but together, we took plenty of
quarters out of circulation. The state quarters turned us all into nimmismatists. It put the collecting bug and all of us, at least a little bit. So when I was in Savannah, I bought a coin, minted just a stone's throw away from beautiful uptown Oakland, California.
It's an S San Francisco mint quarter, so it's never been in circulation. I've learned in the coin world that when people say it's in mint's condition, they mean it literally, like someone got this from the mint and it never made the rounds. This one was made in 1951, that means it's almost all silver, and it has this really nice, bright, chain.
But if you just glance at this coin casually, there's a good chance you wouldn't think anything of it. I wouldn't have just a few months ago.
“I think I'd like to get this never circulated on front of 1951, okay.”
I got this quarter for $20. That's $4 over the intrinsic value, $19.75 over the face value, but I'm not planning on holding on to it for long, calming a sucker, but I think this coin, this little piece of history, deserves to be out in the wild. You're going to put it in circulation.
I'm thinking I might.
Okay.
“Just to see it, to just think about somebody picking it up down the line.”
Absolutely. That's good. Okay. Let's do it. All right.
Funny question, but do you take cash?
When we return, the story of one state quarter that might not have been worth it. So, we're back with Katie Thornton. Hey, Katie. Hey, Rahman. So, we talked about how the state quarter's program works and how they made money
for the government, but I hear you have a story about the design of the quarters. Yes. I have a story of an adventure or maybe a misadventure in state quarter design. But before we get there, I want to just look at all the quarter designs for the quick.
It has a link that has all of the special quarters. Yes. Okay. I see them all. All right.
In front of me. All 50. 50. 50. 50.
“So, if you open them up, I mean, do any stick out to you?”
Let's see.
I like the bison on Kansas quite a bit.
I like the bison. One strong image. Yeah. It's clear that the one that worked the best are kind of trying to put together one cohesive image.
Florida has like a ship and like a space shuttle and some palm trees and stuff and it just looks like a weird patchwork of clip art, you know, and that is not doing it for me. Yeah. I agree.
And I think it sort of makes me think about flag design a little bit in that, you know, you want to sort of strive for cleanness and simplicity sort of like communicating a clear message in as few images as you can. Yeah. No.
I think that there's some similarities. I think the differences are that, you know, quarters are meant to be enjoyed, you know, looking at up close engraving is a real fine detailed art form. So, yeah. I'm open to these being much more complicated.
I do like them to have a kind of cohesive, I don't know, composition and feel to them.
“I think that's the main thing, but like, there's just something about them.”
It's just lovely. I agree. Yeah. I wanted to tell you about one person who I interviewed, who really did not like the design of one of these quarters.
Missouri. Missouri. Okay. Okay. Let me pull up Missouri and see if I can get a Gander of Missouri.
Yeah. For those of us who are not, you know, familiar with the design of the Missouri State Quarter, do you, will you give us a little description? Yes. Short.
It has the gateway arch there and it has trees, so there's sort of a necronistic combination of the arch and trees, and it looks like a depiction of the Lewis and Clark Expedition. So it looks like that's kind of their claim to fame with those quarters that the beginning of Lewis and Clark Expedition. Yeah.
Right. So it's sort of like a handful of different things that are iconically Missouri. Yeah. Definitely not like hideous. No.
But the person who was a really upset about this coin design was the artist who submitted the original design concept. His name is Paul Jackson, and he's a well-known watercolor painter in Columbia, Missouri. And here's how he describes that coin. My original design was sort of an elegant symbol.
It had two people in a canoe and it had the arch, you know, sort of fading into the mist in the background. I mean, that sounds like, in the spirit of what we're looking at, so what is the problem and what did they change that he doesn't like? Well, yeah.
I mean, the overall design concept stayed the same, but Paul says the devil is in the details, like take the arch, for example. In the US mince version, it looks like it's crossing the river from Illinois to Missouri. And it's shaped like a McDonald's French fry bent over. It's the very misshapen.
Well, I mean, it looks like an arch, but I give maybe it's not a factually accurate arch. I could understand this as like the issues with defecting things on coins, but does you have other issues with the design? Yes. He certainly does.
And instead of two guys in a canoe and had three, Larry Mowon curly, they're going downhill up river and the arch crosses the river from Illinois to Missouri, plus the trees you're made of broccoli. Plus the trees are made of broccoli. Okay, so he doesn't like the way the trees are drawn, which I, when you say that they
look like broccoli, they do look like broccoli. I can see what he's talking about. So you know, how did these changes get included into the final design based off of his original painting? Yeah.
So Paul submitted his original design for the Missouri State Quarter Contest to the
First Lady's Office, which was running the competition back in 2001.
He had collected coins as a kid and he thought his design would be a cool way to honor the bicentennial of the Lewis and Clark Expedition. So he was really stoked, 21. And for a while not much happened, he says he didn't hear anything.
Then in the spring of the following year, he got a message.
I got the first email from someone in Georgia saying, "What do you think about what the
“US Mint did to your State Quarter design?"”
And at that point, I had no idea. I didn't know what the US Mint had done to my State Quarter design. The Mint's design looked kind of like Paul's, but Paul and others thought it was just really ugly. There was clearly something wrong. They dumped it down to the point where it was unacceptable.
It was just unusable. And they mispelled the word bicentennial. Well, they must have fixed that, right? I would hope so. But they did eventually just get rid of that word altogether.
Well, good. Did they offer any explanation as to why the design changed and what the redesign process was like?
You know, Paul says he didn't get much from them.
The Mint said it was uncoinable and they said that Paul didn't understand like metal flow and things like this. Oh, sure. And I guess multiple private Mint's who make, you know, special tokens and things like that reached out to him and they were like, "Oh, this is coinable.
We would love to make it." Huh. But Paul says, you know, from the Mint, they just sort of sprung these design changes on him. Paul doesn't seem like he was a person that was going to let this go.
No, he was not going to let this go. He was not going down without a fight. So I gathered a few of my supporters and went to protest. And so I put out the call on AOL and invited anybody who was upset about it to join me at the State Capitol and about 50 people showed up.
They all had little signs. The US Mint lied. They've stolen state pride. Things like that. I mean, I love this scene so much, but did the protests like actually accomplish anything.
Well, it would have been a dud because what Paul didn't realize was that the State Legislature wasn't actually in session at the time. But one thing that Paul did at this protest was he took about 20 quarters, just normal quarters, because you know, at this point, the Missouri State Quarter hadn't actually come out yet.
They'd just been publicizing the design and he printed up some round stickers with his Missouri Quarter design on it, and he stuck it on a tail side of these 20 or so quarters. And the next morning, I was dead asleep and got a phone call from somebody at the Kansas City Star.
“And this reporter said, "How does it feel to be under secret service investigation for”
defacing money?"
And the first quarter of my math was awesome.
That's how you felt. Yep, because I knew at that moment, we had gotten traction. So I printed 250,000 more stickers. And I put them on the back of 250,000 quarters. Whoa, really.
I mean, that's Paul's telling of it. That's more than $60,000 in quarters. Yeah. He said, "Sometimes they would just go to the bank and get rules of quarters and stick them up and then return them to the bank."
I mean, he's like, there's quite a lot of dedication here. But he didn't just return them all to the bank, like he would also use them to sort of continue his protest, to bring his protest to a broader sphere. So we took the show on the road and went to DC and spent nothing but rolls of sticker quarters for gas food and lodging the entire way.
That is amazing. That's amazing. I love that the coin collector types put things into circulation to make a point. Totally. I agree.
I had to double down and clarify this for them, like hold on nothing but quarters. You paid for your hotel room in quarters, not once, but every night and gas. Wow. And also, they didn't just do that. When they got to DC, they rolled this giant four foot diameter foam quarter with his
design from the White House to the US Mint. And the press did love this. And artists from Columbia, Missouri, is upset that the US Mint has rejected his design for the state quarter. He's protesting by putting stickers with his design on the back of real quarters.
Today he'll be handing out those sticker covered quarters in front of the US Treasury Building here in Washington. This is such a f*cking NPR story. Just the straight read, I love it. I mean, it's just a fat, slow pitch down the middle for NPR.
And for us, here we are. But he mentions like that the Secret Service was investigating him. So this is like a question of defacing money.
“Like, is this something that he could actually get in trouble for?”
Oh, okay. So he says he went to the Secret Service headquarters. We tried to turn ourselves in and apparently the Secret Service doesn't listen to NPR or something, but they said we don't have any record of you get out of our building.
I love it.
It's like arrest me.
I love that he's just trying to be, you know, he's just trying to provoke them to have
something happen just so we can kick up enough dust to make this a thing.
“Yeah, I think he's got a real sense of story and drama.”
Oh, absolutely. But ultimately, the type of defacing money that he was doing, it's not illegal. He's not trying to profit from it. So, you know, it's just legally not an issue. And so did any of this, I mean, you show me the final quarter.
So I know Paul didn't get, you know, most of his original design back on the quarter. But did his protests ultimately have any influence on the design process? Yeah, I mean, it was like this whole hub up. And so the mint did keep offering redesigns.
But, you know, Paul just was never really happy with what they did.
And the whole thing left a bit of a bitter taste in his mouth.
“I divested of my coin collection during this entire process because I learned that basically”
I was the savings account for the US Mint. They anticipate that you will take sets of those state quarters out of circulation. Plus the $60,000 with the quarters that he bought to add his painting to the back of. So he created even more senior age opportunities for the federal government through the quarter program without even probably intended.
Right. Yeah, there's definitely a big irony here.
And also, just throughout this whole saga, he made the Missouri state quarter.
And those stickered quarters really hot commodities. Like people definitely took them out of circulation. And that's a win for the mint.
“So if it's like whether it's artist approved or not, the quarters did their job, at least”
in the eyes of the myth. Totally. Though Paul doesn't really think it's quite so black and white because I asked him about that. I asked him who won him or the mint.
Oh, I totally won. Are you kidding? I had a blast and they created more opportunities for me than they cost me. I really, I'm just part of the Paul fan club at this point. What a guy.
What a guy. Thank you, Paul. Thank you for your diligent effort fighting for your coin. Well, Katie Thornton. Thank you so much for this.
I had a great time making this episode with you. Thanks so much for having me, too. 99% of visible was reported this week by Katie Thornton and edited by Joe Rosenberg. Mixed by Martin Gonzalez, music by Swanry Al. Fact checking by Sona Avakian.
Cathy 2 is our executive producer, Kurt Colstet is the digital director to Laney Hall was our senior editor. The rest of the team includes Chris Baroubae, Jason Dillion, Emmett Fitzgerald, Chris for Johnson, Vivian Leigh, Lashma Dawn, Kelly Prime, Jacob Medina Gleason, Talon and Range Stradley, and me, Roman Mars.
But 99% of visible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence. We are part of the serious XM podcast family. Now, headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building, in beautiful, uptown, Oakland, California. You can find us on all the usual social media sites as well as our own Discord server.
There's a link to that as well as every past episode of 99PI at 99PI.org.
